A word on BorderWalker, from creator, editor & de facto publisher, Chris Watkins...

Between 2000 and 2005, I actively ran a comic anthology website called BorderWalker, which featured a host of comic strips and serials, most of them genre adventure. BorderWalker was live for over a decade, but in early 2013, I decided it was time to put the current incarnation to bed (more background here). I have future plans for BorderWalker and the concepts I published under its mantle, but in the meantime, I wanted to leave at least a portion of my own contributions online for folks to enjoy as an archive.

From my perspective as a creator, these pieces are pretty old and dusty, but they're a fun snapshot of where I was at this point in my creative development. Hopefully you'll get a kick out of them, too.

I also want to use this space to pay credit to the other wonderful friends and creators who contributed comics, artwork, writing, time, energy, and advice to making BorderWalker something special in the early days of webcomics.

Many of these folks have newer creative projects of their own online and off, so I'd encourage you to Google them up and see what they're into now.

Electric Spirit was a high-concept project. Story-wise, ES was the tale of a modern day guy named Charlie who wakes up to find himself somehow a holographically projected digital "ghost" in post-apocalyptic future Japan. Conceptually, ES was a comic designed to tell an engaging story while also providing interactive tools for the reader to study Japanese. I was ambitious; I wanted ES to work for all skill levels, and to be a fun read even if you didn't care about the language learning. And I tried to draw it in a prototypical "manga style" (which isn't really what comes naturally). All in all, it was a bit much for one me to handle, and I had to put it on hiatus, even though I still believe the idea has legs. At this point, the first chapter's worth of ES is, I think, incompatible with current web browsers (plus, it's a bear to wrangle all its pieces-parts). So, to give you at least a taste of what it was like, here's the last page I did (shortly after teaching myself Flash):

Without a doubt, Legacy Dawning is my oldest "published" comic project. Its roots extend back into high school (woof!), and it's gone through multiple incarnations, before, during, and after BW. Conceptually, it's a hodge-podge of genres and ideas that intrigued me, and my attempt to wrap it all together into a single package. At its outset, LD is a fantasy-western about a small group of strangers tossed together by the inadvertent discovery of a world-changing secret. Here is the full run--the first two chapters and change--that appeared on BorderWalker: